I trick is that we create specific student groups for the evaluators of the checklists and they are named as such. For instance, if the name of the checklist is: New Hire Orientation Checklist - the student group would be: Eval: New Hire Orientation Checklist. Hope that is helpful.

Have you (or anyone else) discovered anything that might help us at ECHN decide whether we want to spend the money on this or not? We are concerned that it only has Met and Unmet as options for completion of a competency. We are used to indicated the method of instruction as well as the method of evaluation. How would we know HOW the competency was met?

Thank you Emily! I was aware of the other options beside met/unmet. No matter which ones we use it won't match what we do now. And we can't get the preceptors to put their initials and a date in a column on paper now. I can't image that they will be willing to spend time typing in the method of evaluation. Does this actually work for you? Maybe your checklists are much shorter than ours?

The decision has been made that the checklists will not be used for the long competency (example the 40 page long ones). Checklists are being used for certain procedures and sorter competencies. The longest I would advise people is 4 pages. This has been working so far.

We took our orientation competency assessment and broke it up into several short checklists similar to what Emily is doing. Each checklist falls into a category (Systems Assessment & Care, Nursing Tasks/Skills, Patient Safety) and we kept our naming conventions for each course/checklist consistent. For instance, for the Foley Catheter Insertion competency which is part of the orientation competency assessment, this has been broken out into its own checklist entitled, "Nursing Tasks/Skills: Foley Catheter Insertion". For respiratory assessments and care, this was broken out into a checklist entitled "Systems Assessment & Care: Respiratory".

All of these individual checklists are bundled together using a curriculum so it doesn't take up so much room on the staff member's To-Do page. For any new nurse, they will receive about 30 individual checklists, but there are less than 10 items to check off in each checklist. This makes it easy for a preceptor to validate a competency. For example, when the new staff member inserts a Foley Catheter for the first time on the unit, the preceptor can search for the "Nursing Tasks/Skills: Foley Catheter Insertion" checklist, and validate the entire checklist. There is an option to allow evaluators to sign off a checklist with one click but we did not enable this in fear that preceptors will get in the habit of not reading the competencies and just validating the staff members blind.

As for determining how the competency was validated, each checklist has a statement at the top under Evaluator Guidelines that states:

"Please validate this staff member on each competency statement. Each statement must be validated by return demonstration unless otherwise noted in the competency statement itself. If the required validation method is not possible, you may also validate each statement with an alternative method of validation. PLEASE NOTE THE METHOD OF VALIDATION IN THE COMMENT SECTION OF THE APPLICABLE COMPETENCY STATEMENT IF DIRECT OBSERVATION IS NOT USED.

Alternative methods of validation include Direct Observation, Verbalization, Documentation, Written Test, or a HealthStream course."

In most cases, we want the staff member validated by return demonstration but there are some exceptions. For each statement, the preceptor can enter a comment which indicates the method of validation and/or any other comments applicable to the statement.

All of our competency checklists are set up so the staff member must pass the competency in order for it to be complete. If a staff member fails a competency, the checklist is submitted to the transcript with all comments supporting the fail. The same checklist is then automatically reassigned to the staff member to complete again after an action plan is made between the staff member, manager, and preceptors.

I can't thank you enough for taking the time to type this all out for me! This reassures me that we might actually be able to use this product. It will be a process change in terms of how we do things now but I do see that it can be done.

Thank you very much for your assistance. I am going to bring this information to our staff meeting today! Now to find the funds..... ;-)